This is a repost, slightly redacted, from 2012 to help stem the tsunami of folderol washing over us from the orifices of the mindless gun-grabbing Left in the wake of the Las Vegas rampage. 'Liberal' is elliptical for 'contemporary liberal.' I am not speaking of classical, 19th century liberals or JFK-liberals. It is not 1960 anymore.

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Without wanting to deny that there is a 'gun culture' in the USA, especially in the so-called red states, I would insist that the real problem is our liberal culture. Here are four characteristics of liberal culture that contribute to violence of all kinds, including gun violence. So if you want to do something, work against each of the following. But first look in the mirror to see if you are part of the problem.

It is interesting to note that Connecticut, the state in which the Newtown massacre occurred, has recently repealed the death penalty, and this after the unspeakably brutal Hayes-Komisarjevsky home invasion in the same state.

One of the strongest voices against repealing the death penalty has been Dr. William Petit Jr., the lone survivor of a 2007 Cheshire home invasion that resulted in the murders of his wife and two daughters.

The wife was raped and strangled, one of the daughters was molested and both girls were left tied to their beds as the house was set on fire.

The two men convicted of the crime, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, are currently on death row.

Anyone who cannot appreciate that a crime like this deserves the death penalty is morally obtuse. But not only are liberals morally obtuse, they are intellectually obtuse in failing to understand that one of the main reasons people buy guns is to protect themselves from the criminal element, the criminal element that liberals coddle. If liberals were serious about wanting to reduce the numbers of guns in civilian hands, they would insist on swift and sure punishment in accordance with the self-evident moral principle, "The punishment must fit the crime," which is of course not to be confused with lex talionis, "an eye for an eye." Many guns are purchased not for hunting or sport shooting but for protection against criminals. Keeping and bearing arms carries with it a grave responsibility and many if not most gun owners would rather not be so burdened. Gun ownership among women is on the upswing, and it is a safe bet that they don't want guns to shoot Bambi.

2. Liberals tend to undermine morality with their opposition to religion.

Many of us internalized the ethical norms that guide our lives via our childhood religious training. We were taught the Ten Commandments, for example. We were not just taught about them, we were taught them. We learned them by heart, and we took them to heart. This early training, far from being the child abuse that A. C. Grayling and other militant atheists think it is, had a very positive effect on us in forming our consciences and making us the basically decent human beings we are. I am not saying that moral formation is possible only within a religion; I am saying that some religions do an excellent job of transmitting and inculcating life-guiding and life-enhancing ethical standards, that moral formation outside of a religion is unlikely for the average person, and that it is nearly impossible if children are simply handed over to the pernicious influences of secular society as these influences are transmitted through television, Internet, video games, and other media. Anyone with moral sense can see that the mass media have become an open sewer in which every manner of cultural polluter is not only tolerated but promoted. Those of use who were properly educated way back when can dip into this cesspool without too much moral damage. But to deliver our children over to it is the real child abuse, pace the benighted Professor Grayling.

The shysters of the American Civil Liberties Union, to take one particularly egregious bunch of destructive leftists, seek to remove every vestige of our Judeo-Christian ethical tradition from the public square. I can't begin to catalog all of their antics. But recently there was the Mojave Memorial Cross incident. It is absurd that there has been any fight at all over it. The ACLU, whose radical lawyers brought the original law suit, deserve contempt and resolute opposition. Of course, I wholeheartedly endorse the initial clause of the First Amendment, to wit, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." But it is hate-America leftist extremism on stilts to think that the presence of that very old memorial cross on a hill in the middle of nowhere does anything to establish Christianity as the state religion. I consider anyone who believes that to be intellectually obtuse and morally repellent. One has to be highly unbalanced in his thinking to torture such extremist nonsense out of the First Amendment, while missing the plain sense of the Second Amendment, one that even SCOTUS eventually got right, namely, the the right to keep and bear arms is an individual, not a collective, right.

And then there was the business of the tiny cross on the city seal of Los Angeles, a symbol that the ACLU agitated to have removed. I could continue with the examples, and you hope I won't.

Our contemporary media dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. It seems obvious that the liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.

What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their way of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.

The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching. And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy. Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world. See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.

4. Liberals tend to deny or downplay free will, individual responsibility, and the reality of evil.

This is connected with point (2) above, leftist hostility to religion. Key to our Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief that man is made in the image and likeness of God. Central to this image is that mysterious power in us called free will. The secular extremist assault on religion is at the same time an assault on this mysterious power, through which evil comes into the world.

This is a large topic. Suffice it to say for now that one clear indication of this denial is the bizarre liberal displacement of responsibility for crime onto inanimate objects, guns, as if the weapon, not the wielder, is the source of the evil for which the weapon can be only the instrument.

Tuesday, October 03, 2017

1) "Our grief isn't enough. We can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again."

Note first Hillary's hypocrisy. She preaches that we must put politics aside, and then goes on to politicize the shooting. Or perhaps she has a curious notion of politics as that which 'deplorables' engage in while she is above that sort of thing. Besides, to stand up to the NRA is a political act inasmuch as the NRA is in part a political outfit that lobbies Congress in support of Second Amendment rights.

One understands Hillary's animus against the NRA since this organization played an important role in getting Trump elected.

Note second Hillary's thoughtless repetition of the vacuous boilerplate of career politicians: "to stop this from ever happening again." This is the emptiest of empty rhetoric. Everyone knows that these sorts of awful events will continue to occur and that they cannot be stopped. The most that can be done is to take certain steps to reduce their likelihood. For example, baggage checks at the Mandalay would probably have prevented this particular event. It took numerous trips for the shooter to stock his hotel room with guns and ammo.

2) "Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get."

Another reason why Hillary, Dianne Feinstein, and the rest of the liberal gun-grabbers enjoy no credibility with the sane is that they are know-nothings. A so-called 'silencer' does not make gun shots inaudible. It merely suppresses the report somewhat. This is why the correct term is 'suppressor.' But Hillary and her ilk cannot be bothered to learn basic gun terminology such as the distinction between semi-auto and full-auto long guns. On top of that, they always reach for emotive terminology. They don't use descriptive terms like 'semi-automatic long gun' but emotive terms like 'assault weapon.'

There is a technical, non-emotive use for 'assault rifle.' See here. Selective fire is part of the definition. "Selective fire means the capability of a weapon to be adjusted to fire in semi-automatic, multi-shot burst, and/or fully automatic firing mode.[1]" By this technical definition, however, semi-automatic long guns available for civilian purchase without special permits such as as the AR-15, which Hillary and Feinstein would count as 'assault rifles,' are not, technically, assault rifles.

So we have to distinguish between the emotive and the technical use of 'assault rifle.' It is plain that leftists such as Hillary and her ilk use the term emotively.

You would think that philosophers would avoid emotive language. You would be wrong. A reader sends me to Brian Leiter's academic gossip site where he opines that ". . . adult, civilized societies do not allow private citizens to own assault rifles." Leiter is clearly using the term in the emotive sense.

Question for 'liberals': If an AR-15 is used by a citizen to defend his home, his family, and/or his livelihood, is he assaulting or defending?

Are semi-automatic long guns intrinsically assaultive? Is any gun intrinsically assaultive? Or does it depend on how the weapon is used? Obviously, the latter. Are the police armed so that they can assault the citizenry? Think about it, 'liberals.'

A tribute to Charlie Parker by Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen. Hyper-romanticism and cool jazz.

Charlie Parker looked like Buddha. Charlie Parker . . . was called the perfect musician and his expression on his face was as calm beautiful and profound as the image of the Buddha represented in the East  the lidded eyes the expression that says: all is well.

This was what Charlie Parker said when he played: all is well. You had the feeling of early-in-the-morning like a hermit's joy or like the perfect cry of some wild gang at a jam session Wail! Whap! Charlie burst his lungs to reach the speed of what the speedsters wanted and what they wanted was his eternal slowdown. A great musician and a great creator of forms . . . .

. . . Charlie Parker whistling them on to the brink of eternity with his Irish St. Patrick Patootlestick. And like the holy mists we blop and we plop in the waters of slaughter and white meat  and die one after one in Time. And how sweet a story it is

. . . Charlie Parker forgive me. Forgive me for not answering your eyes. For not having made an indication of that which you can devise. Charlie Parker pray for me. Pray for me and everybody.

In the Nirvanas of your brain where you hide  indulgent and huge  no longer Charlie Parker but the secret unsayable Name that carries with it merit not-to-be-measured from here to up down east or west.

This is a draft of a paper from years ago (early aughts) that it looks like I may never finish. But it is relevant to present concerns. So here it is.

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ROYCE REVISITED: INDIVIDUALITY AND IMMORTALITY

“What is it that makes any real being an individual?” Near the beginning of his 1899 Ingersoll lecture, The Conception of Immortality, Josiah Royce identifies this as the fundamental question whose answering must precede any serious discussion of the immortality question.i Since the latter concerns whether we survive bodily death as individuals, it is clear that the logically prior question is: What is it to be an individual?

This question, “formal and dreary” as it may seem, yet “pulsates with all the mystery of life.”ii I share Royce’s enthusiasm since I count it as one of his greatest insights that “the logical problem as to what constitutes an individual being” is identical to “the problem as to the worthy object of love.” (CI 32-33) This essay sets itself three tasks. The first is to expound the main features of Royce’s doctrine of individuality in a rigorous and contemporary manner. The second is to raise some critical objections to it. The third is to sketch an alternative which preserves Royce’s insights.

Sunday, October 01, 2017

Another difficulty with the function-argument theory is staring us in the face, but generally unappreciated for what it is. As Geach says, the theory presupposes an absolute category-difference between names and predicables, which comes out in the choice of ‘fount’ [font] for the schematic letters corresponding to name and predicable. For example ‘Fa’, where the upper case ‘F’ represents the predicable, as Geach calls it, and lower case ‘a’ the name. As a direct result, there is only one negation of the proposition, i.e. ‘~Fa’, where the tilde negates whatever is expressed by ‘Fa’. But ‘F’ is a function mapping the referent of ‘a’ onto the True or the False, so ‘~Fa’ says that a does not map onto the True. The object a is there all right, but maps to a different truth-value. Thus ‘Fa’ implies ExFx, ‘~Fa’ implies Ex~Fx, and excluded middle (Fa or ~Fa) implies that something, i.e. a, does or does not satisfy F. The function-argument account has the bizarre consequence that the name always has a referent, which either does or does not satisfy the predicable. There is no room for the name not being satisfied. Indeed, the whole point of the function theory is to distinguish the idea of satisfaction, which only applies to predicables, from reference, which is a feature of proper names only. As Frege points out here:

The word 'common name' is confusing .. for it makes it look as though the common name stood under the same, or much the same relation to the objects that fall under the concept as the proper name does to a single object. Nothing could be more false! In this case it must, of course, appear as though a common name that belongs to an empty concept were as illegitimate as a proper name that designates [bezeichnet] nothing.

The scholastic two-term account, by contrast, allows for the non-satisfaction of the proper name. ‘Frodo is a hobbit’ is true if and only if something satisfies both ‘hobbit’ and ‘Frodo’. It is essential to Aristotle’s theory of the syllogism, as Geach notes, that the middle term (the one which appears in both premisses) can be subject in one premiss, predicate in another. The notion of ‘satisfaction’ or ‘supposition’ applies to both subject and predicate, even if the subject is a proper name like ‘Frodo’. Thus the negation of ‘Frodo is a hobbit’ can be true in two ways. Either some individual satisfies ‘Frodo’ but does not satisfy ‘hobbit’. We express this in English by so-called predicate negation ‘Frodo is not a hobbit’, where the negative is placed after the copula. Or no individual satisfies ‘Frodo’, which we can express by placing the negation before the whole proposition, ‘it is not the case that Frodo is a hobbit’. So the scholastic theory neatly accounts for empty proper names. Not so for the function-argument theory, a difficulty which was recognised early on. Frege developed a complex and (in my view) ultimately incoherent theory of sense and reference. Russell thought that proper names were really disguised descriptions, which is actually a nod to the scholastic theory.

Of course there is a separate problem for the two term theory, of making sense of a proper name not being ‘satisfied’. What concept is expressed by the proper name that is satisfied or not satisfied, and which continues to exist as a concept even if the individual ceases to exist? Bill and I have discussed this many times, probably too many times for his liking.

BV: What is particularly interesting here is the claim that Russell's theory of proper names is a nod to to the scholastic theory. This sounds right, although we need to bear in mind that Russell's description theory is a theory of ordinary proper names. Russell also allows for logically proper names, which are not definite descriptions in disguise. The Ostrich rightly points out that that for Frege there there is an absolute categorial difference between names and predicables. I add that this is the linguistic mirror of the absolute categorial difference in Frege between objects and concepts (functions). No object is a concept, and no concept is an object. No object can be predicated, and no concept can be named. This leads directly to the Paradox of the Horse: The concept horse is not a concept. Why not? Because 'the concept horse' is a name, and whatever you name is an object.

This is paradoxical and disturbing because it imports ineffability into concepts and thus into logic. If concepts cannot be named and objectified, then they are not wholly graspable. This is connected with the murky notion of the unsaturatedness of concepts. The idea is not that concepts cannot exist uninstantiated; the idea is that concepts have a 'gappy' nature that allows them to combine with objects without the need for a tertium quid to tie them together. Alles klar?

Now it seems to me that Russell maintains the absolute categorial difference between logically proper names and predicates/predicables. ('Predicable' is a Geachian term and it would be nice to hear how the Ostrich defines it.) Correct me if I am wrong, but this presupposition of an absolute categorial difference between logically proper names and predicates/predicables is a presupposition of all standard modern logic. It is 1-1 with the assumption that there are atomic propositions.

Here is one problem. On the Russellian and presumably also on the scholastic theory, an ordinary proper name stands to its nominatum in the same relation as a predicate to the items that satisfy it. Call this relation 'satisfaction.' Socrates satisfies 'Socrates' just as he and Plato et al. satisfy 'philosopher.' Now if an item satisfies a term, then it instantiates the concept expressed by the term. But what is the concept that 'Socrates' expresses? One candidate is: the unique x such that x is the teacher of Plato. Another is: the greatest philosopher who published nothing.

Notice, however, that on this approach singularity goes right out the window. 'Socrates' is a singular term. But 'the greatest philosopher who published nothing' is a general term despite the fact that the latter term, if satisfied, can be satisfied by only one individual in the world that happens to be actual. It is general because it is satisfied by different individuals in different possible worlds. Without prejudice to his identity, Socrates might not have been the greatest philosopher to publish nothing. He might not have been a philosopher at all. So a description theory of names cannot do justice to the haecceity of Socrates. What makes Socrates precisely this individual cannot be some feature accidental to him. Surely the identity of an individual is essential to it.

If we try to frame a concept that captures Socrates' haecceity, we hit a brick wall. Concepts are effable; an individual's haeceity or thisness is ineffable. Aristotle says it somewhere, though not in Latin: Individuum ineffabile est. The individual as such is ineffable. There is no science of the particular qua particular. There is no conceptual understanding of the particular qua particular because the only concepts we can grasp are general in the broad way I am using 'general.' And of course all understanding is conceptual involving as it does the subsumption of particular under concepts.

Some will try the following move. They will say that 'Socrates' expresses the concept, Socrateity, the concept of being Socrates, or being identical to Socrates. But this haecceity concept is a pseudo-concept. For we had to bring in the non-concept Socrates to give it content.

There are no haecceity concepts. As the Ostrich appreciates, this causes trouble for the scholastic two-name theory of predication according to which 'Socrates' and 'wise' are both names, and the naming relation is that of satisfaction. It makes sense to say that the concept wise person is uninstantiated. But it makes no sense to say that the concept Frodoity is uninstantiated for the simple reason that there cannot be any such concept.

It looks like we are at an impasse. We get into serious trouble if we go the Fregean route and hold that names and predicates/predicables are radically disjoint and that the naming/referring relation is toto caelo different from the satisfaction relation. But if we regress to the scholastic two-name theory, then we have a problem with empty names.

It's October again, my favorite month, and Kerouac month in my personal literary liturgy. And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack' reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960. Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment. I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. I bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. I was travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix. New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2. It was there that Lonesome Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack.

I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries. Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was.

Here is a long excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of "October in Railroad Earth," pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.

You don't know jack about Jack if you don't know that he was deeply conservative despite his excesses. The aficionados will enjoy The Conservative Kerouac.

Thanks for linking to the George Shearing ‘September’. I had forgotten he grew up in London (in Battersea, just down the road from me). I love the Bird-like flights on the piano. Indeed I think he wrote ‘Lullaby of Birdland’. Another Londoner is Helen Shapiro who does a great version of ‘It might as well rain until September’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De0_zZ7qQDA. Great alto voice, never made it in the US as far as I know. There is a strange account of her conversion to Christianity here.

I was first hipped to Shearing by Kerouac who referred to him in On the Road. I too love the'Bird'-like flights on the piano. The allusion is to Charley 'Bird' Parker, also beloved of Kerouac. (Kerouac month hereabouts starts today.) Helen Shapiro is new to me, thanks. She does a great job with the Carole King composition. Believe it or not, King's version is a demo. That's one hell of a demo. A YouTuber points out that Shapiro was not part of the 1964 'British Invasion.' I wonder why.

The Ostrich of London sends the following to which I add some comments in blue.

Vallicella: ‘One of Frege's great innovations was to employ the function-argument schema of mathematics in the analysis of propositions’.

Peter Geach (‘History of the Corruptions of Logic’, in Logic Matters 1972, 44-61) thinks it actually originated with Aristotle, who suggests (Perihermenias 16b6) that a sentence is composed of a noun (ὄνομα) and a verb (ῥῆμα), and the verb is a sign of something predicated of something else. According to Geach, Aristotle dropped this name-predicate theory of the proposition later in the Analytics, an epic disaster ‘comparable only to the fall of Adam’, so that logic had to wait more than two thousand years before the ‘restitution of genuine logic’ ushered in by Frege and Russell. By ‘genuine logic’ he means modern predicate logic, which splits a simple proposition into two parts, a function expression, roughly corresponding to a verb, and an argument expression, roughly corresponding to a noun. ‘To Frege we owe it that modern logicians almost universally accept an absolute category-difference between names and predicables; this comes out graphically in the choice of letters from different founts [fonts] of type for the schematic letters of variables answering to these two categories’.

The Fregean theory of the proposition has never seemed coherent to me. Frege began his studies (Jena and Göttinge, 1869–74) as a mathematician. Mathematicians naturally think in terms of ‘functions’ expressing a relation between one number and another. Thus

f(3) = 9

where ‘3’ designates the argument or input to the function, corresponding to Aristotle’s ὄνομα, ‘f()’ the function, here y=x2, corresponding to Aristotle’s ῥῆμα, and ‘9’ the value of the function. The problem is the last part. There is nothing in the linguistic form of the proposition which corresponds to the value in the linguistic form of the mathematical function. It is invisible. Now Frege thinks that every propositional function or ‘concept’ maps the argument to one of two values, either the True or the False. OK, but this is a mapping which, unlike the mathematical mapping, cannot be expressed in language. We can of course write

___ is wise(Socrates) = TRUE

but then we have to ask whether that equality is true or false, i.e. whether the function ‘is_wise(--) = TRUE’ itself maps Socrates onto the true or the false. The nature of the value (the ‘truth value’) always eludes us. There is a sort of veil beyond which we cannot reach, as though language were a dark film over the surface of the still water, obscuring our view of the Deep.

BV: First a quibble. There is no need for the copula 'is' in the last formula since, for Frege, concepts (which are functions) are 'unsaturated' (ungesaettigt) or incomplete. What exactly this means, of course, is a separate problem. The following suffices:

___wise(Socrates) = TRUE.

The line segment '___' represents the gappiness or unsaturatedness of the concept expressed by the concept-word (Begriffswort).

Quibbling aside, the Ostrich makes two correct interrelated points, the first negative, the second positive.

The first is that while 'f(3) = 9' displays the value of the function for the argument 3, namely 9, a sentence that expresses a (contingent) proposition does NOT display its truth-value. The truth-value remains invisible. I would add that this is so whether I am staring at a physical sententional inscription or whether I am contemplating a proposition with the eye of the mind. The truth or falsity of a contingent proposition is external to it. No doubt, 'Al is fat' is true iff Al is fat.' But this leaves open the question whether Al is fat. After all the biconditional is true whether or not our man is, in fact, obese.

The second point is that there has to be something external to a contingent proposition (such as the one expressed by 'Socrates is wise') that is involved in its being true, but this 'thing,' -- for Frege the truth-value -- is ineffable. Its nature eludes us as the Ostrich correctly states. I used the somewhat vague phrase 'involved in its being true' to cover two possibilities. One is the Fregean idea that declarative sentences have both sense and reference and that the referent (Bedeutung) of a whole declarative sentence is a truth-value. The other idea, which makes a lot more sense to me, is that a sentence such as 'Socrates is wise' has a referent, but the referent is a truth-making fact or state of affairs, the fact of Socrates' being wise.

Now both of these approaches have their difficulties. But they have something sound in common, namely, the idea that there has to be something external to the contingent declarative sentence/proposition involved in its being true rather than false. There has to be more to a true proposition than its sense. It has to correspond to reality. But what does this correspondence really come to? Therein lies a major difficulty.

How will the Ostrich solve it? My impression is that he eliminates the difficulty by eliminating reference to the extralinguistic entirely.

Friday, September 29, 2017

Our national life is becoming like philosophy: a scene of endless disagreement about almost everything. The difference, of course, is that philosophical controversy is typically conducted in a gentlemanly fashion without bloodshed or property damage. Some say that philosophy is a blood sport, but no blood is ever shed, and though philosophers are ever shooting down one anothers' arguments, gunfire at philosophical meetings is so far nonexistent. A bit of poker brandishing is about as far as it gets.

Some say we need more 'conversations' with our political opponents about the hot-button issues that divide us. The older I get the more pessimistic I become about the prospects of such 'conversations.' I believe we need fewer conversations, less interaction, and the political equivalent of divorce. Here is an extremely pessimistic view:

I believe the time for measured debate on national topics has passed. There are many erudite books now decorating the tweed-jacket pipe-rooms of avuncular conservative theorists. And none as effective at convincing our opponents as a shovel to the face. But setting that means aside, there is no utility in good-faith debate with a side whose core principle is your destruction. The “middle ground” is a chasm. It is instead our duty to scathe, to ridicule, to scorn, and encourage the same in others. But perhaps foremost it is our duty to hate what is being done. A healthy virile hate. For those of you not yet so animated, I can assure its effects are invigorating.

Unfortunately, Stephens says things that are quite stupid. He says, for example, that disagreement is "the most vital ingredient of any decent society." That is as foolish as to say, as we repeatedly hear from liberals, that our strength lies in diversity. That is an absurdity bordering on such Orwellianisms as "War is peace" and 'Slavery is freedom." Our strength lies not in our diversity, but in our unity. Likewise, the most vital ingredient in any decent society is agreement on values and principles and purposes. Only on the basis of broad agreement can disagreement be fruitful.

This is not to say that diversity is not a value at all; it is a value in competition with the value of unity, a value which must remain subordinated to the value of unity. Diversity within limits enriches a society; but what makes it viable is common ground. "United we stand,' divided we fall." "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Stephens goes on to create a problem for himself. Having gushed about how wonderful disagreement is, he then wonders why contemporary disagreement is so bitter, so unproductive, and so polarizing. If disagreement is the lifeblood of successful societies, why is blood being shed?

Stephens naively thinks that if we just listen to one another with open minds and mutual respect and the willingness to alter our views that our conversations will converge on agreement. He speaks of the "disagreements we need to have" that are "banished from the public square before they are settled." Settled? What hot button issue ever gets settled? What does Stephens mean by 'settled'? Does he mean: get the other side to shut up and acquiesce in what you are saying? Or does he mean: resolve the dispute in a manner acceptable to all parties to it? The latter is what he has to mean. But then no hot-button issue is going to get settled.

Stephens fails to see that the disagreements are now so deep that there can be no reasonable talk of settling any dispute. Does anyone in his right mind think that liberals will one day 'come around' and grasp that abortion is the deliberate killing of innocent human beings and that it ought be illegal in most cases? And that is just one of many hot-button issues.

We don't agree on things that a few years ago all would have agreed on, e.g., that the national borders need to be secured.

According to Stephens, "Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society." Again, this is just foolish. To see this, consider the opposite:

Agreement as to fundamental values, principles and purposes is the lifeblood of any thriving society.

Now ask yourself: which of these statements is closer to the truth? Obviously mine, not Stephens'. He will disagree with me about the role of disagreement. How likely do you think it is that we will settle this meta-disagreement? It is blindingly evident to me that I am right and that he is wrong. Will he come to see the light? Don't count on it.

It is naive to suppose that conversations will converge upon agreement, especially when the parties to the conversations are such a diverse bunch made even more diverse by destrutive immigration policies. For example, you cannot allow Sharia-supporting Muslims to immigrate into Western societies and then expect to have mutually respectful conversations with them that converge upon agreement.

I am not saying that there is no place for intelligent disagreement. There is, and it ought to be conducted with mutual respect, open-mindedness and all the rest. The crucial point Stephens misses is that fruitful disagreement can take place only under the umbrella of shared principles, values, and purposes. To invert the metaphor: fruitful disagreement presupposes common ground.

And here is the problem: lack of common ground. I have nothing in common with the Black Lives Matters activists whose movement is based on lies about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the police. I have nothing in common with Antifa thugs who have no respect for the classical traditions and values of the university. I could go on: people who see nothing wrong with sanctuary jurisdictions, with open borders, with using the power to the state to force florists and caterers to violate their consciences; the gun grabbers; the fools who speak of 'systemic racism'; the appeasers of rogue regimes . . . .

There is no comity without commonality, and the latter is on the wane. A bad moon is rising, and trouble's on the way. Let's hope we can avoid civil war.

If a proposition is true, does it follow that it is rational to accept it? (Of course, if a proposition is known to be true, then it is eminently rational to accept it; but that's not the question.)

Hefner's death reminds me of a true story from around 1981. This was before I was married. Emptying my trash into a dumpster behind my apartment building one day, I 'spied a big stack of Playboy magazines at the bottom of the container. Of course, I rescued them as any right-thinking man would: they have re-sale value and they contain excellent articles, stories, and interviews.

I stacked the mags on an end table. When my quondam girl friend dropped by, the magazines elicited a raised eyebrow.

I quickly explained that I had found them in the dumpster and that they contain excellent articles, arguments for logical analysis, etc. She of course did not believe that I had found them.

What I told her was true, but not credible. She was fully within her epistemic rights in believing that I was lying to save face. In fact, had she believed the truth that I told her, I would have been justified in thinking her gullible and naive.

This shows that truth and rational acceptability are not the same property. A proposition can be true but not rationally acceptable. It is also easily shown that a proposition can be rationally acceptable but not true. Truth is absolute; rational acceptability is relative to various indices.

"But what about rational acceptablity at the Peircean ideal limit of inquiry?"

Well, that's a horse of a different color. Should I mount it, I would trangress the bounds of this entry.

As for Hugh Hefner, may the Lord have mercy on him. And on the rest of us too.

By mainstreaming pornography in Playboy magazine, and valorizing the pursuit of (male, heterosexual) hedonistic pleasure with his highly publicized playboy lifestyle, Hefner made a singularly important contribution to the overthrow of received norms of sexual morals that made modern (post-1960s) feminism possible. But he also accomplished this overthrow by exploiting women, reducing them to sex objects for use (and sometimes abuse) in the satisfaction of the insatiable (and now unconstrained) male libido.

If Linker's claim is that no sort of post-1960s feminism could have arisen without Hef's mainstreaming of pornography, valorization of male hedonism, and overthrow of received sexual norms, then I doubt it. A sort of equity feminism could have arisen without the Hefnerian excesses and without women aping the basest elements in men. I'd be interested in hearing what Christina Hoff Sommers would have to say about this.

That Playboy was a necessary condition of the possibilility of Playgirl is a more credible claim than that the Playboy lifestyle was a necessary condition of the possibility of the rise of any sort of worthwhile post-1960s feminism.

Leftist whining about 'cultural appropriation' and Alt-Right denial of the universality of certain cultural goods may be mirror images of each other. The shared assumption is that cultural goods are not universal but can be owned.

The theorem of Pythagoras has his name on it but neither he nor his descendants own it.

The same goes for the life-enhancing bourgeois values lately preached by Amy Wax.

Thursday, September 28, 2017

1) In its third clause, the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution states, "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging freedom of speech or of the press." This protects the U. S. citizen from any attempt from the side of the U. S. government to squelch free expression. It does not protect a citizen who is in the employ of a private concern from attempts by the employer to limit speech or expression. The kneeling football players while on the field of play have no First Amendment free speech rights. Their employers may fire them just as Google was within its legal rights when it fired James Damore.

The difference is that Google was morally wrong for firing an engineer who spoke the politically incorrect truth, while the club owners are morally wrong if they do not fire the overpaid, disrespectful football players.

2) What the kneelers appear to be protesting is imaginary. Jason Riley:

The players have said they are protesting the unjust treatment of blacks by law enforcement and cite the spate of police shootings that have come to light in recent years. Team owners and NFL officials will have to decide whether to continue indulging such behavior on company time, but the larger question is whether what is being protested has some basis in reality beyond anecdotes and viral videos on social media.

The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today [25 September 2017], and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend. Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.

3) Whether or not the kneelers have anything real to protest, they of course have a right to their opinion. They ought to express it in the proper venue. They also have a moral obligation to get the facts straight and form correct opinions, an obligation they are not fulfilling.

4) Just as the kneelers have a right to their opinion, as foolish and destructive as it is, President Trump has a right to his sane and reasonable one: "Fire the sons of bitches!" My thought exactly. His expression is harsh but justified. There is such a thing as righteous anger.

5) The vicious and destructive Left promotes the lie that Trump's call for a firing of the louts is 'racist.' Not at all. If you believe that lie, you are not only stupid, but vile and deserve moral condemnation.

The kneelers are both white and black, and even if they were all black, race doesn't come into it. The kneelers are being condemned for their lack of civility, their disrespect for the USA, it values, its flag, its anthem, its war heroes, and for injecting politics into what ought to be an apolitical event.

There was a jackass on Tucker Carlson's show the other night who absurdly claimed that 'Fire the sons of bitches" is code for 'Fire the niggers." That is beneath refutation, but it does indicate what scum leftists are.

6) There is also the issue of federal, state, and local subsidies of football franchises using tax dollars. And it is not just the misuse of public funds to build stadiums. The NFL gets billions in subsidies from U. S. taxpayers. That ought to anger you even if you are a football fan. Football is of interest only to some people, does not serve the common good, lowers the general level of a culture, and its subsidy to the benefit of some is not part of the legitimate functions of government.

7) The NFL and the scumbags of the Left don't care what you think and will ignore what you have to say, no matter how reasonable. The only effective way to punish this collection of bastards is by defunding them. Boycott the games and don't buy the merchandise. If you really must watch the game of football, watch the college variety.

John Stuart Mill was another philosopher who believed something similar. In 1859 he published his Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, in which he proposed a voting system heavily weighted towards the better educated. “If every ordinary unskilled labourer had one vote … a member of any profession requiring a long, accurate and systematic mental cultivation – a lawyer, a physician or surgeon, a clergyman of any denomination, a literary man, an artist, a public functionary … ought to have six,” he wrote. When stated this baldly, it is surely obvious that the desire to maintain so-called political expertise is actually a thinly disguised attempt to entrench the interests of an educated middle class.

"Surely obvious?" It is not obvious at all. Why should my informed, thoughtful, independent vote be cancelled out by the vote of some know-nothing tribalist who votes according to the dictate of his tribal leader? Not that I quite agree with Grayling.

Fraser and Grayling appear to represent extremes both of which ought to be avoided. I get the impression that there is a certain animosity between the two men.

For now, just this: If you have devoted your whole soul to the enjoyment and promotion of the pleasures of the flesh, then you had better hope that the soul dissolves with the dissolution of the body. Contemporaries will think that of course it does, but it is not quite obvious, is it?

Hef thought of himself as a liberator and good person. But then I think of all the abortions, all the betrayals, all the marriages and families destroyed by the sexual revolution to which Hef was a major contributor.

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

As much of a flaky liberal as Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968) is, both politically and theologically, I love the guy I meet in the pages of the seven volumes of The Journals of Thomas Merton. I am presently savoring Volume Six, 1966-1967. This morning I came upon the entry of May 21, 1967, Trinity Sunday, in which he reports being "dazzled and baffled" by a new book on quantum physics by George Gamow.

The 52-year-old gushes excitedly over the accomplishments of "Niels Bohr and Co." and "this magnificent instrument of thought they developed to understand what is happening in matter, what energy really is about -- with their confirmation of the kind of thing Herakleitos was reaching for by intuition." (237) Now comes the passage the vitriol of which caught my attention:

What a crime it was -- that utterly stupid course on "cosmology" that I had to take here [at the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in the 1940s] (along with the other so-called philosophy in Hickey's texts!). Really criminal absurdity! And at the time when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima! Surely there were people in the order who knew better than [to] allow such a thing! Dom Frederic, no. He couldn't help it. The whole Church still demanded this, and God knows, maybe some congregation still does. (237-238)

Now I have read my fair share of scholastic manuals, including Klubertanz, Vaske, van Steenberghen, Garrigou-Lagrange, Smith & Kendzierski, and a some others, but I was unfamiliar with this Hickey. Curious to see how bad his manuals could have been, I did some poking around but came up with very little. But I did glean some information from Benjamin Clark, O.C.S.O., Thomas Merton's Gethsemani:

We used as text the three-volume series by J.S. Hickey, abbot of Mount Melleray in Ireland 1932-1934, a text quite widely used in seminaries in the United States at the time. The text was in Latin, but English was spoken in class, unlike some seminaries in the United States at the time where the philosophy lectures were still given in Latin. Most of our students did not have enough Latin background for that, and some found even reading the text rough going at times.

Does anybody have volumes from the Hickey series? Is he willing to part with them? What about scholastic cosmology as presented by Hickey got Merton so worked up?

My desultory research also led me to a quotation from a guy I know quite well:

At any rate, a recent blog post by Bill Vallicella got me thinking about it again. The post is ostensibly about the origins of political correctness. In reflecting on that, Vallicella also had this to say:

By the time I began as a freshman at Loyola University of Los Angeles in 1968, the old Thomism that had been taught out of scholastic manuals was long gone to be replaced by a hodge-podge of existentialism, phenomenology, and critical theory. The only analytic fellow in the department at the time was an adjunct with an M. A. from Glasgow. I pay tribute to him in In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct. The scholasticism taught by sleepy Jesuits before the ferment of the ‘60s was in many ways moribund, but at least it was systematic and presented a coherent worldview. The manuals, besides being systematic, also introduced the greats: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, et al. By contrast, we were assigned stuff like Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. The abdication of authority on the part of Catholic universities has been going on for a long time.

So, how bad was scholastic manualism?

Edward Feser counts as a latter day manualist. See his Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014). Here is an article by Ed in which he lays into David Bentley Hart to repel the latter's charge of scholastic manualism. Excerpt:

Menacing references to the threat of “manualism” and “baroque neoscholasticism” have long been a favored tactic in theologically liberal Catholic circles. Given Aquinas’s enormous prestige and influence within the Catholic Church, attacking some position he took has always been a tricky business. The solution was to invent a bogeyman variously called “manualism,” “sawdust Thomism,” etc. This allows the critic to identify the hated position with that and proceed as if it has nothing to do with Thomas himself. Such epithets generate something like a Pavlovian response in many readers, subverting rational thought and poisoning the reader’s mind against anything a Thomist opponent might have to say. Though neither a theological liberal nor a Catholic, Hart knows what buttons to push in order to win over the less-discriminating members of his audience.

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Leftists hold that borders and walls are 'racist' and 'hateful' and 'fascist' and that the nation state is an illegitimate construct. They bristle at talk of national identity and national sovereignty. Is it not then paradoxical for these same leftists to embrace identity politics at the sub-national level?

Monday, September 25, 2017

You think that if God exists, He exists necessarily, and if He does not exist, He does not exist necessarily. But suppose that God does not exist. We agree, I think, that we can't rationally rule out the possibility? For instance, you've often argued that our evidence doesn't settle the question of theism versus atheism. But then, supposing that God doesn't exist, and supposing that He might not exist in the actual world (for all we know), isn't it evident that regardless there are lots of truths? For instance, even if God does not exist, it would still be true that He does not exist, or that He does not exist necessarily. I'm not sure that you'd agree with this, but if you would, shouldn't you also agree that if God does not exist, there are some truths?

That is not quite what I said. I accept what I call Anselm's Insight: if God exists, then he exists necessarily; if he does not exist, then necessarily he does not exist. What does not exist necessarily might be contingent; what necessarily does not exist is impossible. I know you understand the idea; it is just that your formulation suffers from scope ambiguity. Anselm's Insight, then, is that God is either necessary or impossible. He is necessarily non-contingent. (The non-contingent embraces both the necessary and the impossible.) In the patois of possible worlds, either he exists in every, or in no, world. If you wonder why I don't capitalize 'he,' it is because I hold that while piety belongs in religion, it does not belong in philosophy of religion.

Agreed, we cannot rationally rule out the possibility of God's nonexistence. I would say we cannot rationally rule it out or rule it in. "But then, supposing that God doesn't exist, and supposing that He might not exist in the actual world (for all we know), isn't it evident that regardless there are lots of truths? "

I would rewrite your sentence as follows:

It is epistemically possible that God not exist. Nevertheless, it is evident that there are truths.

I agree with the rewrite. It is evident that there are truths, but for all we can claim to know, God does not exist. But this leaves open how God and truth are related. Here are five different views:

1) There is truth, but there is no God.

2) There is truth, and there is God, but God is not the ontological ground of truth.

3) There is truth, there is God, and truth ultimately depends on the existence of God. There is truth because there is God.

4) There is no truth, because there is no God.

5) There is God, but no truth.

Ad (1). This I would guess is the view of many. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist. This, I take it, would be the standard atheist view.

Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers. Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths, but would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either.

Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept. Thus I would affirm the subjunctive conditional lately mentioned. The difference between (2) and (3) is subtle. On both sides it is held that both God and truths are necessary, but the Augustinian -- to give him a name -- holds that God is the ultimate 'source' of all truth and thus all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility.

Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view.

Ad (5). I have the impression that certain post-Nietzschean POMO-heads hold this. It is view not worth discussing.

I should think only the first three views have any merit.

Each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be proven.

I will mention quickly a problem for the admittedly plausible first view.

Among the truths there are necessary truths such as the laws of logic. Now a truth is a true truth-bearer, a true proposition, say. Nothing can have a property unless it exists. (Call this principle Anti-Meinong). So no proposition can have the property of being true unless the proposition exists. A necessary truth is true in every metaphysically possible world. It follows that a necessarily true proposition exists in every possible world including worlds in which there are no finite minds. But a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exists except for a mind. If there is no God, every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.

Here are some ways an atheist might 'solve' the problem:

a) Deny that there are necessary truths.

b) Deny that truth is any sense a property of propositions.

c) Deny Anti-Meinong.

d) Deny that propositions are thought-accusatives; accept some sort of Platonism about propositions.

But each of these denials involves problems of its own which I would have no trouble unpacking.

Interesting. Take it with several grains of salt and factor in the fact that it is by a 'transwoman.' The following is borne out by my experience:

But ultimately I don't need academic philosophy to do philosophy. My blogging over the past ten years has reached a larger audience than I could ever hope to achieve through the academic journal system.

On a really good day I'll get 3,000 page views. Usually I bump along at about half of that or less. But I reach people and influence them. Proof is the thick manila folder of fan mail I have received.

What in the world happened to the liberal arts? A degree in the humanities used to transmit the knowledge and wisdom imbued in the works of great Western artists, writers, musicians and thinkers like Shakespeare and Mozart. But today, that same degree stresses Western racism, sexism, imperialism, and other ills and sins that reinforce a sense of victimhood and narcissism. So, what happened? Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute explains in a five and one half minute video.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

It is always a pleasure to get a challenge from a professional philosopher who appreciates the intricacies of the issues and knows the moves. The comments below address things I say here. My responses are in blue.

A few questions about this idea:

"As Nietzsche saw, if there is no God, then there is no truth. And if no truth, then no intrinsic intelligibility. Next stop: perspectivism, Nietzsche's central epistemological doctrine."

1) Suppose that if p, nothing is true. Does that make sense? Surely whatever p is, if p then at least p itself is true.

BV: What you are saying is something I agree with, namely, that it is incoherent, indeed self-refuting, to maintain that nothing is true. For either it is true that nothing is true or it is is false. (Assume Bivalence to keep it simple.) If true, then false. If false, then false. Therefore, necessarily false.

Now could it be true that if there is no God, then there is no truth? Easily. A true conditional can have a false antecedent and a false consequent. We have just seen that the consequent is false, indeed, necessarily false. That the antecedent is true is not excluded by anything we know. So assume it true. Where's the problem?

2) A related problem: How do we understand or reason about anything in some scenario where, supposedly, nothing is true? How do we understand things like 'if ... then ...' except in terms of what is or would be true given the truth of the antecedent?

BV: Well, can't we reason about incoherent ideas, among them necessarily false propositions? Consider the following subjunctive conditional

A. If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then there would be no truth.

Both antecedent and consequent are necessarily false; yet the conditional is (arguably) true! The antecedent is necessarily false because God is a necessary being. I accept Anselm's Insight (but not his Ontological Argument). The Insight is that nothing divine can have contingent modal status: God is either necessary or impossible.

Surely we can argue, correctly, to and from necessarily false propositions such as Nothing is true. Of course, when we engage in such reasoning we are presupposing truth. If that is your point, then I agree with it.

3) If there's a 'total way things are', and that's 'the truth' or the truth about the actual world, then surely there has to be a truth about a world where God does not exist--there's a total way things are, including various states of affairs but not including the existence of God. How are we to understand the idea that, if the actual world is Godless, there's some total way things actually are, and yet no truth? What more is needed for there to be truth, or the whole truth, in a Godless world? Or do you mean to say that in a Godless world there is no 'total way things are'? But then how would that even count as a world, or a scenario? (Is there even a less-than-total-way-things-are, at least? And in that wouldn't there have to be some particular truths, if not total truth or Truth?)

BV: I accept Anselm's Insight: If God exists, then he exists in every metaphysically possible world; if God does not exist, then he exists in no metaphysically possible world. I also accept Nietzsche's Insight that if there is no God, then there is no truth. no total, non-relative, non-perspectival way things are independent of the vagaries of human belief and desire. So I disagree when you say "surely there has to be a truth about a world where God does not exist."

4) In some of your other entries on this topic you are suggesting that truth might be a property of God's thoughts, or maybe just the totality of His thoughts. (Is that right?) But intuitively there is a distinction between the truth of a thought and the thought itself, so that even though God's thoughts are necessarily true, those same thoughts could have been false thoughts (though not while being His thoughts, of course). Suppose this is right. Then, in a Godless world, there is some totality of thoughts--merely possible thoughts, maybe, for lack of a suitable Thinker--that fully characterizes that world. Why can't we say that there's truth in that world simply in virtue of the totality of thoughts that would have been true if God had existed there?

BV: Let's distinguish some questions:

a) Is there truth? Is there a total way things are that is not dependent upon the vagaries of human (or rather ectypal-intellect) belief and desire? Answer: Yes, truth is absolute, hence not a matter of perspective.

b) What is the truth? This is the question about which propositions are true. Obviously, not all are. It presupposes an affirmative answer to the first question. Only if there are some true propositions or other can one proceed to ask which particular propositions are true.

c) What is truth? This question concerns the property -- in a broad sense of 'property' -- the possession of which by a truth-bearer makes it true. If a truth is a true proposition, then all true propositions have something in common, their being true; what is this property?

Frege uses Gedanke, thought, to refer to what we refer to by 'proposition.' Let's adopt this usage. A proposition, then, is a thought, not an act of thinking, but the accusative or direct object of an act of thinking. Frege held that thoughts have a self-subsistent Platonic status. That's dubious and can be argued against. Arguably, there is no thought without a thinker. Thoughts/propositions, then, have a merely intentional status. But some thoughts are necessarily true. It follows that there is need for a necessary mind to accommodate these thoughts. I lay this out rigorously in a separate post to which I have already linked.

I don't say that the truth is the totality of God's thoughts since some of these thoughts are not true. Socrates dies by stangulation, for example, is false, but possibly true. And yet it is a perfectly good thought. God has that proposition/thought before his mind but he doesn't affirm it. This is equivalent to saying that God did not create a world in which Socrates dies by strangulation.

Of course, I distinguish between the thought and its truth value, and I don't think every thought is necessarily true. Why do you say that God's thoughts are necessarily true? Of course, God, being omniscient, knows everything that it is possible to know. But only some of what he knows is necessarily true. He can't know false propositions, but he can think them by merely entertaining them (with or without hospitality).

Think of a possible world as a maximal proposition, a proposition that entails every proposition with which it is logically consistent. God has an infinity of these maximal propositions/thoughts before his mind. He entertains them all, but affirms only one. After all, there can be only one actual world. I of course reject David Lewis' theory of actuality.

If God does not exist, then God is impossible. (Anselm's Insight again.) He then exists in no world including the actual world. But then there are no truth-bearers in the actual world, and hence no truths. But if no truths, then no total way things are.

You speak of "merely possible thoughts." But that's ambiguous. Do you mean a thought/proposition that actually exists but is merely possibly true? Or do you mean that the proposition itself is merely possibly existent? I am assuming that there are all the propositions there might have been; that some are true and some false; and that among the false propositions some are necessarily false (impossibly true) and that some are possibly true.

5) If there is no truth, how could that rationally support perspectivism? Maybe I just don't understand perspectivism, but suppose this is the idea that any old thought can be true (perspectivally, at least) just in case it seems true to someone, or enhances their feeling of power, or whatever... In a truth-less world, THAT is also not true: it's just not true that any old thought can be true or be rationally considered true under circumstances x, y or z. Perspectivism isn't true, or isn't any truer than anti-perspectivism. In other words I don't understand why granting that God is necessary for truth justifies Nietzsche in affirming some other, merely perspectival concept of truth; he should just be a nihilist about truth, I guess.

BV: I insist that truth, by its very nature, is absolute and thus cannot be perspectival. I reject perspectivism. So there is no question of rationally supporting perspectivism. It is an irrational and self-defeating doctrine.

You say, "I don't understand why granting that God is necessary for truth justifies Nietzsche in affirming some other, merely perspectival concept of truth; he should just be a nihilist about truth, I guess."

I am not claiming that Nietzsche rationally justifies his perspectivism. But one can understand how he came to the doctrine. He has a genuine insight: no God, no truth. (By the way, for me 'insight' is a noun of success in the way that 'know' is a verb of success: there are no false insights any more than there is false knowledge.) There are no truths, but there are interpretations and perspectives from different power-centers; these interpretations and perspectives are either life-enhancing and 'empowering' or not. This can be (misleadingly) put by saying that truth is perspectival.

Is perspectivism identitarian or eliminativist? Is Nietzsche saying that there is truth but it is perspectival in nature, or is he saying that there is no truth? I would say that the identity collapses into an elimination. Truth cannot be perspectival; so to claim that it is amounts to claiming that there is no truth. So I agree that one could say that he is a nihilist about truth.

What makes this all so relevant is that cultural Marxism is heir to Nietzsche. To understand the Left you have to understand Nietzsche and his two main claims, one ontological the other epistemological. "The world is the will to power and nothing besides." Truth is perspectival. This sires the leftist view that everything is power relations and social construction. Reality and its intrinsic order are denied.

All but a very tiny proportion of human beings are biologically male (an X and a Y chromosome in the genome) or female (two X chromosomes). A person who is biologically of one sex but believes himself to be of the other is in the grip of a delusion. That is what everybody would have said 50 years ago.

Some of those who said it would have followed up with an expression of disgust; some with unkind mockery; some with sympathy and suggestions for psychiatric counseling. Well-nigh nobody would have said: “Well, if he thinks he’s a gal, then he is a gal.” Yet that is the majority view nowadays. It is a flagrant denial of reality; but if you scoff at it, you place yourself out beyond the borders of acceptable opinion.

It is, of course, the same with race. I still blink in disbelief when I hear or read someone saying, “There is no such thing as race.” It falls on my ears much like “There are no such things as mountains,” or “There is no such thing as water.” Of course there is such a thing as race. Until recently, everyone knew this. As I like to remind people, the founder of the modern biological sciences surely knew it.

[. . .]

Reality denial is rampant on the Left. Part of the explanation, according to Derbyshire, is the decline of religion. The rise in reality denial is due to the decline in religion!

Derb's idea is that in the past religion functioned like a lens to focus our wishful thinking on one nonexistent object, God, or rather on one set of nonexistent objects (God, angels, devils, incarnate, pre-incarnate, and dis-incarnate spirits) to the exclusion of all other nonexistent objects. But with the decline of religion, the urge to deny reality becomes unfocused and can take almost any object, including denizens of the sublunary:

Religion as a lens: When people stop believing in God, the old quip goes, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.

Very serious, practical people—statesmen, generals, industrialists, engineers—often used to be deeply religious, holding the unreal—the transcendent, if you want to be polite—corralled in one part of their mind while the rest grappled with reality. Religion focused wishful thinking—kindly Sky Fathers listening to our prayers, wisps of immortal spirit-stuff in our heads—into a coherent set of ideas and habits.

As a theist, I cannot of course accept Derbyshire's partial explanation of leftist reality denial. I of course agree that people engage in reality denial and wishful thinking, and I accept the examples given above as examples of reality denial.

So here is an alternative partial explanation.

Atheists presuppose truth. That is, they presuppose that there is a total way things are that does not depend on the vagaries of human belief and desire. (An atheist will be quick to point out that desiring that there be a Heavenly Father is a very bad reason for thinking there is one.) The characteristic atheist claim is that the nonexistence of God is a part of the way things are. Theists, most of them anyway, also presuppose that there is a way things are. Their characteristic claim is that the existence of God is a part of the way things are. The common presupposition, then, is that there is a total way things are. The question is not whether there is truth, but what the truth is. The question is not whether there is a total way things are; the question is which states of affairs are included in and which excluded from the total way things are.

The death of God, however, brings in its train the death of truth as Nietzsche himself fully understood. The loss of belief in the Christian God calls into question whether there is truth at all. For God is not just another being among beings, but the source of the Being of every being other than God, as well as the source of the intelligibility and value of every being other than God. But nothing is intelligible unless there is truth to be discovered. As Nietzsche saw, if there is no God, then there is no truth. And if no truth, then no intrinsic intelligibility. Next stop: perspectivism, Nietzsche's central epistemological doctrine. (The God-truth linkage can be rigorously argued in various ways; here is one.)

Once truth goes by the boards, then nothing counts as true or real except what we want, desire, interpret in line with our interests, socially construct, or what enhances the feeling of power in us, 'empowers us' to use a leftist-POMO turn of phrase with roots in Nietzsche's perspectivism. As Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power #534:

Das Kriterium der Wahrheit liegt in der Steigerung des Machtgefühls.

The criterion of truth resides in the heightening of the feeling of power.

Once we get to this point in the history of the death of God/truth, a boy can choose to become a girl, and a white a black. Hell, a white boy could choose to become a black girl! Why not? You just identify yourself that way, there being no fact of the matter to prevent you from choosing any self-identification you like. Hence the absurdities decried by Derbyshire and the rest of the coalition of the sane, the absurdities of transgenderism and transracialism.

God, I am urging, is the support of the way things are. Kick away that support and Being dissolves into a Heraclitean flux of opinions and perspectives.

Summary

The fact that wants explaining is the fact of leftist reality denial. Two different explanations:

Derbyshire: Time was when wishful thinking was focused on God and other nonexistent objects of religion. But God is now dead culturally speaking, among the elites of the West. (And this is good because, in fact, there is no God.) The need for wishful thinking, however, remains strong. It gets shunted onto sex and race and the results are the reality-denying absurdities of transgenderism ansd transracialism.

Vallicella: God is real, but no longer believed to be real by the elites in the West. Man, seduced by the life-extension consequent upon advances in medical technology, and mesmerized and held in thrall by his 24/7 all-invasive and -pervasive communications technology, can no longer bring himself to believe in anything beyond the human horizon. The human horizon seems to extend limitlessly. The death of God, however, brings with it the death of truth, and this opens the floodgate to any and all perspectives which are 'true' only in the sense that they reflect the identities and the power demands of those who are the subjects of the perspectives.

In short: God is not the focus of our wishful thinking in such a way as to keep the rest of out thinking focused on reality; God is the support of truth and reality and thus the presupposition of the distinction between wishful thinking and reality-oriented thinking.

A great line—because it spoke a great truth—was this: “The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented.” Mr. Trump then paused and looked at the audience. It struck some as a “please clap” moment. It struck me as a stare-down: I’m saying something a lot of you need to hear. You’re not going to like it, and I’m going to watch you not like it.

Things in Canada are worse than I thought. Their Pee-Cee brigades are even more insane than ours. Quotable (and quoted):

At the University of Toronto, after receiving two written warnings, he [Jordan Peterson] has been in danger of losing his job following his announcement that he would refuse to use the preferred gender pronouns of students and faculty who don’t identify with their biological gender, to the fury of radical transgender activists. The use of such pronouns is mandatory under a recently instituted Canadian law, Bill C-16. Peterson rejects the injunction on free speech grounds. ‘I’m not going to cede linguistic territory to post-modernist neo-Marxists,’ he says. He has expressed the view that he might use the preferred gender pronoun of a particular person, if asked by that individual, rather than having the decision foisted on him by the state.

Well, at least one Canadian has a pair of balls. The C-16 law is fucking insane if you will excuse my French.

Free speech is a core value for him — the core value — and one that is becoming increasingly pressing, most recently (as I write this) with the resignation of the Labour shadow minister Sarah Champion after she made remarks in the Sun about Pakistani sex gangs and ran foul of what was considered acceptable by the Labour leadership. That elements of the left have begun to label free speech as somehow a ‘right-wing’ value is particularly rattling (although such censorious thinking has a long history in radical left ideology).

Free speech a right-wing value? It's classically liberal.

‘If I can’t say what I think, then I don’t get to think, and if I can’t think then I can’t orient myself in the world, and if I can’t do that, then I’m going to fall into a pit and take everyone else with me,’ Peterson says.

Peterson has been saddled by some of his critics with the label ‘alt-right’, which he views as a ridiculous slander. He describes himself as a ‘classic British liberal’ who makes those on both the left and right uncomfortable. He supports socialised health care and the liberalisation of drug use, and is libertarian on most social issues.

‘Alt-right’ is certainly one of the most inaccurate pigeonholes you could imagine cramming him into. His heroes include Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn. He is a Christian, but more on the pattern of existential Christians such as Søren Kierkegaard or Paul Tillich than anything to be found in the Midwest Bible belt.

Peterson’s thought-crime is that he disagrees with the view of transgender activists that gender is a social construct and has no grounding in biology (although he is not opposed to transgender rights in general).

It is reasonable to hold that gender roles are in part socially contructed as long as you also hold that they are influenced by underlying biological realities. But if you say that gender is a social construct with no grounding in biology then you show that your contact with reality is minimal if not nonexistent. If your stupidity is a willed stupidity than I condemn you morally. People have a moral obligation to use their intellects properly.

There is a curious paradox here. Lefties who accuse global warming skeptics of denying reality and being anti-science themselves deny reality and are anti-science in their constructivist views of gender and race. The difference, of course, is that there is good reason to be skeptical of the global warming theses of the climate alarmists, but no good reason to doubt that gender and race differences are ultimately rooted in biological differences.

So why does his right to free speech trump a transgender activist’s right not to be offended? Why not just keep his thoughts to himself?

‘Because thoughts aren’t like that,’ he says. ‘People mostly think by talking. Not only do they think by talking, but they correct their thoughts by talking. If you deprive people of the right to think, then you doom them to suffering. You doom their stupidity of its right to die. You should allow your thoughts to be cast away into the fire — instead of you.’

His claims about gender — that women consistently differ, cross-culturally, from men on many of the Big Five personality traits identified by psychometric researchers — are, in psychology circles at least, not particularly controversial. These traits are Openness, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Agreeableness (each of these are technical definitions that are somewhat more precise and different in meaning to their casual usage as terms).

‘These traits are not social-cultural,’ says Peterson. ‘The evidence is crystal clear. As you make a country more egalitarian, the gender differences get larger. Most particularly, women are higher when it comes to Agreeableness — wanting everyone to get along, not liking conflict, compassionate, polite, self-sacrificing — and Neuroticism — higher in negative emotion and more responsive to grief and threat and punishment and isolation.’

Anyone with any experience of life knows that women as a group are more agreeable than men as a group. Why the hell do you think they are 'over-represented' among realtors? And anyone who is not stupid, or a leftist, knows that the statement two sentences back cannot be refuted by uncovering a covey of prickly, jack-booted dykes, or a convention of Walter Mitties.

Friday, September 22, 2017

Edmund Husserl has a beef with Descartes. In Cartesian Meditations, sec. 10, Husserl alleges that the Frenchman fails to make the transcendental turn (die transzendentale Wendung). He stops short at a little tag-end of the world (ein kleines Endchen der Welt), from which he then argues to get back what he had earlier doubted, including the external world. Despite his radical doubt, Cartesius remains within the world thinking he has found the sole unquestionable part of it.

Descartes replaces ego with substantia cogitans, mens sive animus. This give rise to what Husserl calls the absurdity of transcendental realism. Husserl's thought seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn one is left with no entity existing in itself on which one can base anything. Everything objective acquires its entire Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) from the transcendental ego, including any thinking substances there are.

Now I'm perplexed. Just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all Seinsgeltung? Is it at all? If it is or exists at all, then it is in the world, even if not in the physical world. It is in the world as the totality of entities. But it can't be inasmuch as the transcendental ego as the constitutive source of all ontic validity is pre-mundane.

The puzzle could be put like this. Either the constitutive source of all Seinsgeltung is pre-mundane or it is not. If the former, then it would appear to be nothing at all. If the latter, then it is not the constitutive source of allSeinsgeltung.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

I found the following sentence in David Benatar's The Human Predicament, p. 36:

Nothing we do on earth has any effect beyond it. (36)

This sentence slipped past the Oxford editors. The initial letter of 'earth' ought to be capitalized since the word is being used as the proper name of a planet. A while back, Cher threatened to leave for Jupiter, not jupiter, should Trump win the election. Men are from Mars, not mars, and women from Venus, not venus.

Mons veneris, however, is from the proper name of the goddess of love, not the planet. You know what it means and you know that it does not refer to an extraterrestrial geological formation.

But if you are talking about dirt or soil or the mythical Aristotelian element, then write 'earth.' The lower case is also employed in such expressions as 'What on earth are you saying.'

The same goes for such expressions as 'She's not long for this earth.' When a person on Earth dies, his body does not leave Earth. But he leaves the world in one sense of 'world.' Sic transit gloria mundi.

We speak of formative influences; why not also of deformative influences? Parents and siblings, family and friends, church and school, the rude impacts of nature, the softer ones of language and culture -- all contribute to our formation but to our deformation as well. The learning of a craft is a formation, but as Nietzsche sagely observes, "Every craft makes crooked." If so, every formation is a deformation.

'White supremacist' is becoming the Left's smear word of choice eclipsing even 'racist.' This leads to an interesting question: Is every racist a white supremacist? That depends on what you think a racist is.

On one definition, a member of a race is a racist if he harbors an irrational hatred of the members of some other race just in virtue of their membership in that other race. It follows that blacks who harbor an irrational hatred of whites just in virtue of their being white are racists. But presumably few if any of them would count as white supremacists, on any reasonable definition of the latter.

To answer the title question: it is not the case that every racist is a white supremacist; with few exceptions black racists are not white supremacists.

Now what I have just written has a tongue-in-cheek flavor. I am not seriously trying to straighten out any 'progressive' loon. For surely it would be absurd to invoke reason in the Left's lunatic asylum. It would be absurd to point out to a race-obsessed 'progressive' that 'racist' and 'white supremacist' have different meanings.

Race obsession is a cognitive aberration of leftist group-thinkers. These sick people need therapy, not refutation or calm analysis.

Leftists like to call themselves 'progressives.' We can't begrudge them their self-appellation any more than we can begrudge the Randians their calling themselves 'objectivists.' Every person and every movement has the right to portray himself or itself favorably and self-servingly.

But if you are progressive, why are you stuck in the past when it comes to race? Progress has been made in this area; why do you deny the progress that has been made? Why do you hanker after the old days?

It is a bit of a paradox: 'progressives' routinely accuse conservatives of wanting to 'turn back the clock,' on a number of issues such as abortion. But they do precisely that themselves on the question of race relations. They apparently yearn for the bad old Jim Crow days of the 1950s and '60s when they had truth and right on their side and the conservatives of those days were either wrong or silent or simply uncaring. Those great civil rights battles were fought and they were won, in no small measure due to the help of whites including whites such as Charlton Heston whom the Left later vilified. (In this video clip Heston speaks out for civil rights.) Necessary reforms were made. But then things changed and the civil rights movement became a hustle to be exploited for fame and profit and power by the likes of the race-baiters Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Read almost any race screed at The Nation and similar lefty sites and you wil find endless references to slavery and lynchings and Jim Crow as if these things are still with us. You will read how Trayvon Martin is a latter-day Emmett Till et cetera ad nauseam.

For a race-hustler like Jesse Jackson, It Is Always Selma Again. Brothers Jesse and Al and Co. are stuck inside of Selma with the Oxford blues again.

In case you missed the allusions, they are to Bob Dylan's 1962 Freewheelin' Bob Dylan track, "Oxford Town" and his 1966 Blonde on Blonde track, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again."

William Kilpatrick uncorked a powerful insight in a must-read piece to which I linked yesterday:

Because so many Americans still live mentally in a time when intolerance was considered the greatest evil, they have difficulty understanding that an indiscriminate tolerance can father just as many sins.

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

What follows are excerpts from a powerful and penetrating essay by William Kilpatrick who deserves an award for his insight and courage. Please read the entire piece. Emphases added.

Submission. That’s what the word “Islam” means. Muslims must submit to Allah, and the rest of the world must eventually submit to Islam. Submission does not necessarily require conversion, but it does require that one acknowledge the superiority of Islam, pay the jizya tax, and, in general, keep one’s head down.

Europe is currently in the process of submitting to Islam, and America also seems destined to eventually submit. If you have young children or grandchildren, it’s likely that they will have to adapt at some point to living in a Muslim-dominated society. It won’t necessarily be a Muslim-majority society because, as history testifies, Muslims don’t need a majority in order to successfully take control of non-Muslim societies.

[. . .]

A culture war can only be fought by cultural institutions—schools, churches, political and civic organizations, and so on. As things stand, however, none of our cultural institutions have shown much evidence that they are equipped to fight a culture war with cultural jihadists. The chief reason this is so is that most of these institutions are still fighting the last culture war—the civil rights struggle and the concomitant war against intolerance, racism, and bigotry. This “old-war” mentality makes it nearly impossible for our cultural and civic leaders to resist Islamization. Because so many Americans still live mentally in a time when intolerance was considered the greatest evil, they have difficulty understanding that an indiscriminate tolerance can father just as many sins.

One way of grasping the vulnerability of our society to Islamization is to ask “Who’s going to stop it?” Where, exactly, are the forces of resistance?

The university? American universities are bastions of political correctness and mandatory tolerance. Most of them are already quite sympathetic to the Islamic point of view. A combination of intimidation (from both Muslim and leftist groups), Saudi money, and multicultural ideology has ensured that when push comes to shove, the universities will line up with the Islamist camp. If present trends continue, American universities will fold to Islam just as German universities once folded to the Nazis.

The media? The media is still trying to find a motive for the 9-11 attack. That’s because it still won’t make the connection between Islamic terror and Islamic belief. In general, media people see it as their duty to put the best possible face on all things Islamic. Scratch the media as a source of resistance.

The Church? As with college administrators, many Church leaders are deeply mired in multicultural ideology. They are constantly on the lookout for offenses against the “other.” Accordingly, American bishops seem to think that “Islamophobia” poses a grave threat to society. Many of them seem more concerned about anti-Muslim bigotry than about the victims of Islamic terror. To prove that they themselves are not “Islamophobes,” the USCCB operates one of the largest programs for resettling refugees from Muslim countries into the U.S. Besides facilitating Muslim migration, American, as well as European bishops, have facilitated the migration of Islamic beliefs. On numerous occasions, prominent clergy have pronounced these beliefs to be benign and peaceful, and thus deserving of a warm welcome. In general, Church leaders see themselves as friends and protectors of Islam. Given their current mindset, the bishops are unlikely to recognize an Islamic cultural putsch, let alone resist it.

Big Business? Corporations also qualify as cultural institutions. Much of our understanding of what is culturally acceptable and unacceptable is picked up in the workplace. This can be a good thing and often was in the past. Unfortunately, many corporations now reflect and magnify some of the worst cultural trends: arbitrary speech codes, draconian diversity policies, transgenderism, and the like. Currently, several large corporations are using their leverage to suppress speech that is critical of Islam. Giant companies such as PayPal, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are actively trying to shut down websites and individuals that provide accurate information about Islamic cultural jihad. The media monopolies are playing the role that the Ministry of Truth played in Orwell’s 1984. All the really useful information about Islam that has been painfully accumulated in recent years is being quietly dropped down the memory hole.

Why are the counter-jihad sites being shut down? Because they supposedly are “intolerant” and “racist.” Here we come back to the “old-war” mentality. The corporations, the schools, the churches, and the media are ready to do battle with racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and transgenderphobes, but they lack the mindset that would allow them to resist the long march through the institutions being conducted by determined and skillful cultural jihadists. In short, their energies are focused on evils that have long been in retreat or on non-existent evils (transgenderphobia, etc.). Meanwhile, the much larger threat posed by Islam draws ever closer.

The people who might be expected to fight this new culture war are scarcely aware of its existence. They are too busy championing the cause of newly invented “civil rights.” Fifty years ago they would have been on the cutting edge, now they are on the edge of irrelevancy.

Nowadays, the cutting edge is elsewhere. And when the “cutting-edge” cultural and business elites meet the cutting-edge of Islamization, they will almost inevitably submit to it. That is what they have already begun to do. And as the culture war with Islam heats up, the submission process will only accelerate.

"Cutting edge" is right. It's a good bet that the leftist enablers of Islam will be the first of the infidels to have their throats cut. They will learn the hard way, too late.

If you fancy yourself clear-thinking, then you ought to be very careful with the word 'over-represent' and its opposite. These words are ambiguous as between normative and non-normative readings. It is just a fact that there are proportionately more Asians than blacks in the elite high schools of New York City. But it doesn't follow that this state of affairs is one that ought not be, or that it would be better if there were proportional representation. So don't say that the Asians are 'over-represented.' For then you are trading in confusion. You are blurring the distinction between the statement of a fact and the expression of a value judgment.

Consider the sports analogy. Asians are 'under-represented' on basketball teams. That is a fact. But it doesn't follow that this state of affairs is one that ought not be, or that it would be better if there were proportional representation. Enforced proportional representation would adversely affect the quality of basketball games.

Women are 'over-represented' among massage therapists and realtors in that there are more of them than men in those professions. Is that bad? Of course not. It is just a fact. And one easily explained. Women are better than men at the sorts of negotiations that real estate transactions involve. For an excellent discussion of such generic statements see my cleverly named Generic Statements. It has been my experience that liberals have a heard time wrapping their heads around generic statements. They also have a hard time grasping the logic of stereotypes.

As for the massage therapists, it is easy to understand why most of them are women. Men love to have their naked bodies rubbed in dark rooms by women. Women do not love to have their naked bodies rubbed in dark rooms by men. Capisce? By the way, both of the preceding statements are themselves generic.

If you say that women are 'under-represented' in philosophy, are you reporting a fact or reporting a fact plus bemoaning said fact? It is true that there are fewer women than men in philosophy. But it doesn't follow that this is a state of affairs that needs correction. There are perfectly non-nefarious explanations of the fact.

'Over-represent' and 'under-represent' are words best avoided because they paper over illicit inferential slides from the factual to the normative/evaluative. Is that why liberals like them?

He is doing pretty well, according to Hugh Hewitt. Surprisingly well, I would add, if you consider the formidable factions arrayed against him: the Democrat Party; the liberal media; knuckleheaded Never-Trumpers; Deep State operatives; Ryan, McConnell, McCain and the rest of the milque-toast, go-along-to-get-along, appease-the-Left careerists among the Republicans.

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

This is the second in a series of entries on Benatar's new book. The entries are collected here. Herewith, some notes on pp. 13-34. Summary does not constitute endorsement. Note also that my summary involves interpretation and extension and embellishments: I take the ball and run with it on occasion.

The sense that one's life is insignificant or pointless has several sources. There is the brevity of life, its insecurity and contingency, and its apparent absurdity.

Our lives are short and they transpire on a tiny planet in a huge universe that doesn't care about us. Add to this the extreme unlikelihood of any particular biological individual's coming into existence in the first place. Had my father been killed in the War, I wouldn't exist. Had my parents never met, I wouldn't exist. Had my parents not had sex in the month in which I was conceived, I wouldn't exist. (Benatar endorses as I do Kripke's Essentiality of Origin thesis.) I could not have sprung from any pair of gametes other than the exact pair from which I did spring. Iterate these considerations back though my lineage. Had my paternal grandfather died while playing with dynamite as a boy, then my father wouldn't have existed. And so on.

But while my coming to be was exceedingly unlikely, my ceasing to exist is dead certain. "We are doomed from the start." (14) The probability that I should have come to be at all was vanishingly small; I am (metaphysically) contingent at every moment of my existence; my death is (nomologically) necessary.

And then there is the sense of absurdity that can arise when we step back and observe our doings and those of others from outside. We take ourselves with great seriousness. Injustices, slights, accomplishments, projects seem so real to us if they involve us. But how real can they be when we will all soon be dead?

Suppose I recall some bitter conflict between long dead relatives. Who cares about that any more? It was intensely real to the parties involved, it consumed them at the time, but now I alone remember it, without affect, and when I am gone no one will remember it. How significant was it if it will soon be encairned in oblivion? The rich personal pasts of trillions who have gone before are as nothing now. They are now nothing to anybody. All those complicated inner tapestries of longing and fear and memory -- all now nothing to anybody.

You say the past WAS and always will have been? I'm enough of a realist to grant that. But a past beyond all memory is next to nothing.

An old tombstone depicts dates of birth and death with a dash separating them. That bare dash represents the details of a life that is now nothing to anybody. (15, n.3) I would add that the 'proper' name on the tombstone, 'Patrick J. McNally,' say, is as common as can be. Every tombstone soon comes to memorialize no one in his ownmost particular particularity.

Understanding the Question

What exactly are we asking about when we ask about the meaning of human life? For some the question is the same as the question whether life is absurd. But what is it for life to be absurd? On Thomas Nagel's famous account, absurdity arises from "the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt." (Nagel as quoted by Benatar, p. 20)

Nagel's account of absurdity implies that the life of a mouse cannot be absurd because mice are incapable of adopting an external perspective on their lives. But it also implies that the life of a human who contingently fails ever to take up the external perspective cannot be absurd either. Benatar, however, maintains that a man's life can be absurd even if he does not recognize it as such. He has us imagine a mindless bureaucratic paper shuffler whose life is arguably absurd even though he never adopts Nagel's external perspective in a way to induce a collision between the seriousness with which he takes his job and its arbitrarity and dubiousness.

Benatar's point is in part terminological. He proposes to use 'absurd' and 'meaningless' interchangeably. On such a use of terms, a man's life can be Benatar-absurd without being Nagel-absurd. Your life can be absurd or meaningless whether you know it or not. There is a fact of the matter; it does not depend on what view you take. You cannot avoid meaninglessness by sticking to (what I call) short views and avoiding (what I call) long ones. (See Long Views and Short Views: Is Shorter Better?) Many people are better off not taking long views and thinking heavy thoughts. It would be too depressing for them. But philosophers want to know. For them, sticking to short views is a miserable evasion.

But what is a meaningful life? It is a life that has "impact." (23) Benatar seems to use this terms as synonymous with "purpose" and "significance." (23) "A meaningful life is one that transcends one's own limits and significantly impacts others or serves purposes beyond oneself." (18) Question for Benatar: must the impact on others be of positive value? Caligula's impact on others was considerable but of overall negative value. Can a theory of existential meaning be axiologically neutral? Or must we say that an objectively meaningful life must be one whose influence on others is positive?

Impact is a matter of degree and so meaning is a matter of degree (23). But there are also levels to consider. We need to distinguish cosmic meaning from terrestrial meaning. Your life may have no cosmic meaning but possess some terrestrial meaning. Benatar is not a total meaning nihilist. Cosmic meaning is meaning from the point of view of the whole universe. Terrestrial meaning is either meaning from the point of view of humanity, or meaning from the point of view of some human grouping such as nation, tribe, community or family, or meaning from the point of view of the individual.

Subjective and Objective Meaning

This is an important distinction. If your life feels meaningful to you, i. e., if it is subjectively meaningful, it may or may not be objectively meaningful. One could of course refuse to make this distinction. One could hold that the only (existential as opposed to linguistic) meaning there is is subjective meaning. If your life seems meaningful, then it is, and there is no sense in asking about some supposed objective meaning. Benatar, however, thinks that subjective and objective meaning can come apart.

He invokes Richard Taylor's example of a Sisyphus-like character, call him Sisyphus II, in whom the gods have mercifully implanted an irrational impulse to roll stones. (25) Sisphyus II finds it immensely meaningful to roll a heavy rock to the top of a hill, let it roll down again, and then repeat the performance ad infinitum. Benatar's intution, and mine as well, is that such a life, while subjectively satisfying, is objectively meaningless. And the same goes for the beer can collectors and all who devote their lives to trivial pursuits. A subjectively meaningful life can be objectively meaningless.

On a hybrid theory of existential meaning, a life is meaningful only if it is both subjectively and objectively meaningful. Benatar denies, however, that subjective meaningfulness is a necessary condition of a meaningful life. Franz Kafka's life was objectively meaningful, due to his literary and cultural influence or "impact," but apparently not subjectively meaningful to Kafka who had ordered that his writings be burned at his death, an order that was fortunately not carried out. Benatar holds that Kafka's life was, on balance meaningful, contra the hybrid theory.

Benatar's primary interest is in objective meaning (27). Given the cosmological and the three terrestrial perspectives, in which of these is human life objectively meaningful?

In the following chapter, Benatar develops his thesis that cosmically our lives are objectively meaningless. But he generously allows us some terrestrial objective meaning.

For an individual x to have objective meaning is suffices for this individual to have a "positive impact" (27) on some other individual y. From the individual perspective of y, x's life has individual meaning. Except for a few radically isolated individuals, the lives of all have an "impact" on others. What is troubling here is the slide from "positive impact" to "impact." Presumably a positive impact is a good impact or influence. Do only good impacts confer meaning, or will any old impact do? I am not clear as to what Benatar's view is here.

Moving up a level to that of the group or community, Benatar has no trouble showing that many individuals' lives are meaningful from from the perspective of a group such as the family. The highest terrestrial level is that of humanity in general. Here too the lives of a number of individuals enjoy objective meaning. Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, William Shakespeare, Florence Nightingale, Jonas Salk and many others are individuals whose lives enjoy objective meaning from the perspective of humanity at large.

The good news, then, is that at the three terrestrial levels, many human lives possess objective meaning. The bad news is that no one's life has cosmic meaning.

The use of the traditional inclusive generic pronoun "he" is a decision of language, not of gender justice. There are only six alternatives. (1) We could use the grammatically misleading and numerically incorrect "they." But when we say "one baby was healthier than the others because they didn't drink that milk," we do not know whether the antecedent of "they" is "one" or "others," so we don't know whether to give or take away the milk. Such language codes could be dangerous to baby's health. (2) Another alternative is the politically intrusive "in-your-face" generic "she," which I would probably use if I were an angry, politically intrusive, in-your-face woman, but I am not any of those things. (3) Changing "he" to "he or she" refutes itself in such comically clumsy and ugly revisions as the following: "What does it profit a man or woman if he or she gains the whole world but loses his or her own soul? Or what shall a man or woman give in exchange for his or her soul?" The answer is: he or she will give up his or her linguistic sanity. (4) We could also be both intrusive and clumsy by saying "she or he." (5) Or we could use the neuter "it," which is both dehumanizing and inaccurate. (6) Or we could combine all the linguistic garbage together and use "she or he or it," which, abbreviated, would sound like "sh . . . it." I believe in the equal intelligence and value of women, but not in the intelligence or value of "political correctness," linguistic ugliness, grammatical inaccuracy, conceptual confusion, or dehumanizing pronouns.

What a sexist Neanderthal this Kreeft fellow is! Send him to a re-education camp!

Apparently, such norms are white-supremacist, misogynistic, and homophobic. And what norms might these be? Why, "hard work, self-discipline, marriage and respect for authority."

Apparently you are a 'racist' if you advise blacks to "Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Eschew substance abuse and crime."

As stupid as this is, it perhaps gives us a clue as to the 'liberal' criterion of racism: Something is racist if it is something blacks can't do. So deferring gratification, working hard, saving and investing, refraining from looting, showing respect for legitimate authority are all racist because blacks as a group have a hard time doing these things.

To promote and recommend these life-enhancing values and norms is to 'dis' their 'culture.' After all, all cultures are equally good, equally conducive to human flourishing, right?

Are these the implications here? I'm just asking. I am trying to understand. I am trying to get into the liberal head. So far it seems like diving into a bucket of shit. Or am I being unfair? Am I missing something?

Monday, September 18, 2017

Was the British Empire a good or bad thing for the world? To put it another way, is freedom a good or bad thing for the world? Historian and author H.W. Crocker III explains why we may want to rethink the British Empire's bad rap.